


The Angel, the Devil and the Cat

by Vmwrites



Category: The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt
Genre: Angst, Boris is dead, Drug Use, M/M, Overdosing, Trigger Warning!, adult boreo, im not even sure what this is
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-28
Updated: 2019-11-28
Packaged: 2021-03-05 23:22:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,127
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21597718
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vmwrites/pseuds/Vmwrites
Summary: Theodore Decker mourns his lovers death and finds a cat.
Relationships: Theodore Decker/Boris Pavlikovsky
Kudos: 42





	The Angel, the Devil and the Cat

Theo will never forget the night that Boris died. He could try to push it to the back of his mind, shove any possible mention of it down to the bottom of his throat, quickly steer any conversation off of that road and head-on into a lamppost of another. But it will always be there. The back is still a place of his mind, and his throat is not a bottomless pit, and any conversation steerer he tries to bring up crashes straight into a lamppost of a story filed with Boris, Boris, and more Boris. 

That isn’t his fault. How could he ever possibly forget? Does one whose lover dies in their arms ever really forget?

He grew up shooting up from his sleep, covered with nightmare-infused sweat, panting from horrible recounts of his mother’s death, and Boris was always there to bring him back down to earth. Even as they got older, moved in together, established a semi-normal living condition, Boris would pull his distressed body back down into the shared bed of their small apartment bedroom and remind him just how safe he was there with him. 

But what now? What can Theo do when he’s awoken with a jump from the flashing images in his mind, pieced together to form Boris laying lifeless in his arms with a bloody nose. 

It had been approximately two years since it happened. Two years since Theo had got home from a day at the shop and found Boris on the floor, bleeding, with a bag of white powder spilled out onto the table. 

He thought everything was fine. _Boris can handle cocaine, he does this all the time._

It wasn’t until the doctor confirmed that the coke was laced with some sort of lethal drug he could not pronounce,(nor did he ever want to be able to in case he could never get the sound of it out of his head) that he began to understand what had happened. 

Even through pulling Boris into his arms and smacking him on the face. Even when wiping the blood running down his nose onto his pale cracked lips. Even when he roughed him up as much as his body and mind would allow him too and still received no response. _He’s fine, he’s fine. He just had a little too much. He’s used to it._

Even at the hospital, Theo didn’t believe he had died and before then, he had refused check for a pulse. The angel on his shoulder was telling him that there was _no need to check, he was perfectly fine, checking would be doubting both him and yourself._ The devil on his other shoulder was telling him to _check if he was so sure._

Sometimes he wondered which voice was supposed to be the angel and which was the devil. They both lied to him. His only confidant who told him everything he needed to know, who played both the angel and the devil in almost every situation, was not there to speak to him right now. His body was lying in a hospital bed, but he himself was god knows where.

Perhaps curled up in a dark alleyway, chasing mice and scrounging for an ounce of warmth. 

* * *

Theo refused to go back to the apartment for weeks until Hobie urged him to go check on its condition. 

“I’ll come with you.” Hobie had said.

“I think if I’m gonna face it, I might as well face it alone.”

Walking in created an intense pang of anxiety, telling him that his eyes would once again fall upon a bleeding, knocked out Boris on the living room floor. But, the floor was empty and the table was clean. Everything was different. The only thing that stayed the same was Theo’s broken heart. 

He had brought some cardboard boxes with him to clear out some of Boris’ stuff that was simply too painful to look at. He would keep his sweaters that had his scent still lingering. He would keep his colognes and his jewelry and his expensive dress shoes. It was the other, less materialistic things that Theo could not bring himself to keep. The sketchbook he kept with all the beautifully drawn birds and sweet rough sketches of Theo. The tiny wooden box he bought from the dollar store one night and painted over with a soft lavender purple. The empty picture frame he kept on their bedside table. 

_Put a picture in it, Borya_

_I’ll get to it_

He never did.

Theo couldn’t handle to look at any of it. Most people would keep the sentimental items and scrap the ones of hard-cash value, but it was the sentiment that brought Theo back down again, to a place of pure pain and trauma. Boris’ fancy, expensive materials were solely his exterior. The way he presented himself and allowed for others to see him. The other little things were his interior. Who he truly was, what he truly loved. Remembering Boris for what he loved and how much that made him love him, made it impossible to hold onto these things.

Once two whole cardboard boxes holding the sweet, soft side of Boris’ life were filled, Theo brought them down into the elevator, outside the apartment building, and towards the trash. 

It was freezing and extremely windy, bags rustling in the trash bin and gusts howling into his bare ears. It was also dreadfully dark. They didn’t necessarily live on the safest part of town and to be outside with all these things so late into the night was probably a bad idea. Theo didn’t care. His mind had been in a constant state of, _if anything were to happen to me right now, I would not mind. Not in the slightest. _

He could barely see, his glasses sliding to the tip of his nose and his hands to busy with the boxes to adjust them. He saw a small black figure cross in front of his path, then trace around his feet, nuzzling against the shin of his jeans. He flinched and dropped the boxes, which strangely did not lose a single one of its contents on the fall. He adjusted his glasses and saw before him, a black cat.

The cat was thin and long, with a coat of black fur and glowing yellow eyes. It circled around his feet once again, before hopping into one of the boxes and resting its body over Boris’ most loved belongings.

“Hey, shoo. Get out of there.”

The cat wouldn’t budge. It appeared to take a strange comfort in Boris’ things, nuzzling itself down as if to go to sleep, despite the box being filled with hard, solid objects. 

He kicked the box gently in hopes of getting the cat to jump out, but to no avail. The cat only rested its ahead atop one of Boris’ personalized coffee mugs. 

_“You got a mug with my face on it?”_

_“Is like drinking from your hands.”_

_“That’s my face, not my hands.”_

Theo felt perplexed. He couldn't toss the box into the trash with an animal in it, in fear that it could possibly get hurt, and he couldn’t leave it just lying there for someone to come claim as their own. He stared for a moment and then gently pulled the box back into his hands. The cat curiously peered up at him but did not move from its imaginably uncomfortable spot. Something about the cat’s bright eyes struck something in Theo, and he decided he couldn’t leave the other box sitting there either. He lifted the other box back into his arms and headed right back into the building and up to the apartment. 

He set the boxes down and the cat finally moved from its spot. It hopped out and began to circle the living room as if it knew the whole place by heart. Theo watched it cautiously, but it never did anything strange, nor did it appear frightened by the change of scenery. 

_I’ll keep it here for the night and I’ll get rid of it by tomorrow. With the boxes._ At least that’s what he thought at the time.

That night, to avoid bringing a cat over to Hobie’s, he spent the night in the apartment. His first night there since Boris had died. He was scared, terrified even, but he found comfort in this strange little specimen that appeared to have claimed the house as its own. He didn’t feel as alone as he thought he would.

When he woke up in the middle of the night gasping and scrambling to find his glasses, the cat nestled its head against his arm and purred gently. Theo looked and calmed down slightly from the state his nightmare had sent him in. He even managed to laugh a tiny bit at the cat’s utter unknowingness. 

That night turned into another night, and then another, and then another. He enjoyed the new pet too much and was strangely comforted by it. It made him stay put in his place at the apartment, reassuring Hobie that he was okay, and leaving the boxes of Boris’ belongings by the foot of his bed.

It wasn’t just the contents of the box the cat was attracted to, it was other belongings of Boris’ as well.

In moments of great grief, Theo would pull Boris’ old jackets out and lay them on his bed and simply stare at them. The cat would jump up and roll itself around on the jackets. Theo couldn’t bring himself to remove the cat , but he worried that the jackets would lose their lingering scent of Boris with the cat getting its fur all over them. He would later come to realize, they would not. 

* * *

Theo never moved out of the apartment and two years later he had experienced a painfully long day.

His day was spent at a prestigious luncheon for local art and antique dealers, and anyone he spoke to felt the need to bring up Boris.

_How are you doing, Theo?_

_The anniversary is coming up._

_I know a really good grief counselor._

He shrugged everyone off, quickly detouring the conversation in such a nature that it made him appear as if he were perfectly fine and never even had a thought of him. Although, one comment really did strike him. A woman who had known Theo from when he first moved in with Hobie had always been vocal about her distaste towards Boris and even in his death she never shied away from it. 

“We always knew he was trouble,” she said in a light-hearted tone, but Theo still felt a pang strike his heart. 

“He was like a dark cloud of bad luck, we all always thought if he went down, he’d take you right down with him.”

Another woman from Theo’s childhood with Hobie chimed in with a gentle laugh,

“God, I worried for myself too when he was around. Like a black cat that man. You don’t want him crossing your path, that’s gotta be unlucky.”

His whole way home he replayed that comment in his mind. _Had they really all hated him that much? Whatever. Fuck them. _

The harsh jokes and comments had left his mind abruptly and all he could think about was Boris Boris Boris. 

Walking back into the apartment, his eyes out of focus, kicking the door shut, he seemed unaware of his surroundings. He wasn’t taking in the vision of anything around him and all he could see was a beautiful sleeping Boris painted in his mind.

Absent-mindedly, (or in his case, Boris-mindedly) he pulled a loaf of bread out of his cabinet and threw a slice down onto the counter. He reached into the cabinet next to it and pulled out a small bag of sugar. Taking some into his fingers, he sprinkled it onto the bread before him. 

He broke pieces of it off and began to eat it, half-unaware that he was even doing so. His brain now creating the image of a morning-after Boris, waking up with messy hair, glowing under the rising sunlight shining in through their bedroom window.

His thoughts were interrupted by the sound of a small thud atop the kitchen counter. He looked and there was the cat staring at him as he came to the realization of what he was doing. 

He looked down at the sugar-coated bread and broke off a piece as small as he could. He took the piece and put it to the cat’s mouth, to which it ate it happily with no hesitation.

Theo watched and smiled. 

He knew then, that he will forever be grateful to have crossed paths with a black cat. 


End file.
